Welcome to the Power of Connections course blog. This is where we are posting Power of Connections course content for the open Web, and also where we'll create our open catalog of ideas and activities for student engagement. The facilitators for this learning experience will also use this site to share personal reflections on learning design and student engagement. When referencing the course or this blog, please use the #NTPoC hashtag.

Sunday, July 26, 2015

Unit 3: Mapping Your Social Network

I am by nature a very kinetic and visual learner. You may have a sense of this already from the first two artifact challenges (the photo introductions and the web history). So, as I was chatting with Rob the other day about my connections in the online world, I of course wanted to make a visual representation of those connections to understand them better. That is, I wanted to map my online social connections.

Let’s start with the simplest tools and output using your Twitter account. These two tools are not really analyzing your social connections, but they do give you an attractive map of where your followers come from.

TweepsMap – This tool produces a free map of where your twitter followers are located around the globe. Here is my map, for example. It is kind of cool to see that I have followers in Australia and Norway – I didn’t know!!

Special NOTE: If you choose to enable any service to access your Twitter account, you can always revoke access by going to your Twitter Settings, then select Apps. You will see a list of applications that can access your twitter account., and can click to revoke access.

Mapping Your LinkedIN Network

Socilab.com – This site creates a diagram of your LinkedIn network, showing how different users are connected to each other. You can also see outliers with no connections to anyone else in your network. It also lists some measures of your network like the number of clusters you are connected to.

Here is my graph. Please note that I have removed the names to protect the innocent.

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You can click on each node and it will highlight who that person is connected to. This helps you to see clusters and connections that you didn’t anticipate. It really is a lot of fun to play with. I was really surprised at how many people I have with no connections (out there on the fringes). As I look at the individuals, I can see that some of my outliers COULD be connected to other people in my network, i.e. I know that these two people work for the same organization, but for some reason they are not connected.

Mapping Your E-mail Network

Immersion from MIT Media Labs – Immersion uses the metadata from your emails (To, From, CC and time) to map the connections within your email. You can map your Gmail, MSExchange or Yahoo mail. There is also a Demo account if you don’t want to put in your own credentials.

You can move through time to see how the connectors in your email have changed over time. Immersion focuses on your inbox, so if you are very tidy, you may not see too many connections.

Here is my connected work email. I did remove names since I have some student emails. But you can see the clustered people (the green group is one specific project I am working on, so there is a lot of cc’ing on these emails). The big blue dot is my boss.